The most useful thing you can teach a manager is to stop answering

Coaching skills training teaches managers to ask before they tell, so their people learn to solve problems rather than queue for answers. It matters most where managers were promoted for being the best at the work, because their instinct is to fix everything themselves, and a manager who fixes everything becomes the bottleneck their whole team waits on.

Watch a busy manager for a day and count how many times someone brings them a problem and leaves with the manager's answer. Each one feels like good management: fast, helpful, decisive. Add them up over a year and they describe a team that cannot move without its manager, and a manager who has no time to manage because they are doing everyone's thinking.

LHH's work on building coaching cultures starts from this observation: the habit of answering is the single biggest brake on a team's growth, and it is a habit, not a fixed trait. In Vietnam it is reinforced by something cultural as well, because seniority often carries the expectation that the senior person supplies the answer. That makes the change harder here, and also worth more, because the teams around a manager who learns to coach have further to rise.

What coaching actually means in a manager's week

Coaching, for a manager, is not a formal session with a certificate on the wall. It is the five-minute conversation where someone brings you a problem and you ask what they have tried, what they think is really going on, and what they would do if you were on leave. It is giving feedback honestly enough that it changes something, and ending the conversation with a commitment and a date rather than a vague intention. Done consistently, it moves the thinking from your desk to theirs.

Why managers do not just pick this up

Most managers were promoted for being excellent at the work itself, and the better they were, the stronger the fixing instinct. Telling is faster in the moment, every time; the cost only shows up later, in a team that waits. Asking well is also genuinely a skill: vague problems have to become clear goals, listening has to catch what matters and not just what is said, and difficult feedback has to land without damaging trust. None of that is personality. All of it is trainable, and it is trained by practising, not by being told about it.

What good training looks like

A programme that changes behaviour has three marks. First, it is mostly practice: managers coaching each other on real situations from their own workplace, with an experienced coach watching and giving feedback on the spot. Second, it gives managers one simple structure for the conversation and a small number of tools, not a theory of coaching; a manager needs something they can use on Tuesday morning. Third, it teaches judgement about when to coach at all, because coaching is a second gear, not a replacement for direction: some moments need a decision, and a manager should know which is which.

What changes when it works

The early signs are small: a manager asks a question where they would have given an answer, and the person pauses, thinks, and produces something workable. The later signs are the ones a business notices. Problems get solved one level down from where they used to. One-to-ones shift from status reporting to development. And the manager gets hours of their week back, because the team no longer routes everything through them. Our version of this training is The Manager as Coach Program, two days run in-house for your own managers, built around a simple four-step structure for the conversation and four practical tools, led by an ICF-certified coach, with most of the time spent practising.

The Manager as Coach Program is level 1 of our Coaching Pathway Series. We have applied to the International Coaching Federation for Continuing Coach Education credits for it.

Back to all insights